


Tear Everything Down (And Rebuild)

by Thistlerose



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Angst, Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Community: purimgifts, F/M, Friendship/Love, Missing Scene, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-03
Updated: 2012-03-03
Packaged: 2017-11-01 00:56:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thistlerose/pseuds/Thistlerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of the war, Katniss and Peeta cope with their memories, and start to grow back together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tear Everything Down (And Rebuild)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [batyatoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/batyatoon/gifts).



I wasn’t thinking about Peeta as I gathered black walnuts, grabbing them up from the frosted ground and tossing them into my backpack. I wasn’t thinking about anything except that I’d found food and it hadn’t cost me a single arrow. And that I could take care of myself.

I didn’t think about him as I walked home either, but then I passed his house and saw that the light in his kitchen was on, and before I knew it, I was knocking on his door. I didn’t knock hard, just sort of rapped the door with my knuckles. 

As I waited, I rubbed my arms and shivered. It was cold, and the clouds were thick and gray. Though it was only late fall, I figured it would probably snow soon, maybe even tonight. I hoped it wouldn’t. Not that I didn’t like snow, but Prim used to crawl under the blankets with me on snowy nights, and we would huddle together for warmth, cold nose to cold nose, ankles overlapping. 

Peeta opened the door after about a minute, and I could tell from the apron around his waist and the flour on his hands and nose that I’d interrupted him in the middle of baking. I started to apologize and back away, but he said “Katniss. Come on in,” while wiping his hands on the apron, trying to get the flour off. I wondered if he knew there was some on his face too. He didn’t seem to.

“I found black walnuts,” I said, showing him the backpack slung over my shoulder. “Out in the woods.” I hadn’t intended to share them with him, but I suddenly felt like I needed an explanation for showing up on his doorstep.

“Okay,” he said. A moment passed. He was still holding the door open. “Um, do you want to come in?”

I shrugged. Then I realized I had to actually make a choice, or we’d be standing here forever, just kind of avoiding each other’s eyes, so I said, “Sure.” 

I walked past him into the house, which was warm and well lit and totally empty except for us. He closed the door behind us and motioned me into the kitchen, where I could see what I’d interrupted: dough in the process of becoming bread. There was a mound of it, maybe the size of two large fists, on a wooden cutting board on the marble counter. All of it – the dough, the cutting board, and the counter – were sprinkled with white flour.

“I was just kneading,” Peeta explained. “Then it has to rise for about an hour. Can I get you anything? Tea?”

I shook my head, although hot tea sounded good; I was still cold. 

“Well, you can help yourself to whatever you want. Not that there’s much.”

I helped myself to a chair over by the kitchen table. As I sat, letting my backpack full of walnuts slide to the floor at my feet, Peeta dipped his hands into a bag of flour and reached for the dough again.

I watched him for a while, my body half-twisted toward him, my arms folded along the back of the chair. I’d never actually seen him bake before. He’d sprinkle the dough with flour, then push the heels of his palms into it, moving them back and forth in a slow rhythm, flattening the dough. Once it was flat, he’d pick it up, fold it into quarters as if it were some kind of lumpy, sticky paper, then reach for more flour. Although he never looked up, he must have known I was watching because the tips of his ears turned pink.

I looked down at my own hands. My nails were short and rough, with black dirt underneath the tips. The skin across my knuckles was red and chapped because I hadn’t been wearing gloves. I thought about how smooth my hands had looked under the care of my old prep team. I didn’t miss it - those perfectly manicured hands had never felt like they belonged to me – but I couldn’t help making the comparison, and just then it occurred to me that this was probably the most comfortable I’d ever been around Peeta – there was no reason to perform, for once – and it still felt awkward.

Peeta grunted softly and I looked back up in time to see him slam the dough into the cutting board. He dragged a hand across his forehead, smearing it with flour, then slammed his fist hard into the dough.

Had he forgotten I was there?

“Peeta,” I said firmly. For a breathless second it was like we were back in the Capitol. “ _Peeta._ ”

His head jerked up. He blinked at me for a moment, then quickly looked down again. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Sometimes, I just… I want to do something, but I can’t, so I take it out on harmless dough.” A corner of his mouth quirked, like he was trying for a smile, but it faltered.

I understood. Some days I felt so apathetic, I just wanted to lie in bed and dissolve. Other days, I couldn’t sit still. I felt so angry and restless, that I had to go off into the woods and run or throw things until I’d exhausted myself. My bow wasn’t much use then; my hands shook too hard, and it would have been a waste of arrows anyway.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

Suddenly I wished I had dough – or anything, really – to mangle. I wanted it so badly that my fists clenched.

Then I thought of something. I climbed to my feet.

“I have an idea,” I said.

  


While I waited in the kitchen doorway, my backpack slung over my shoulder, Peeta quickly rolled the dough into a smooth ball and placed it in a butter-lined bowl. “That needs to rise for about an hour,” he said as he draped a cotton cloth over it. Then he turned to me, eyebrows raised expectantly over his eyes.

“Get a coat,” I said. “And come on.”

We went outside. The air was colder and the clouds looked steel-plated, but it wasn’t snowing yet. Peeta followed me down the front steps and onto the narrow concrete walkway that ran to the end of his property. 

“What are we doing out here?” he asked, his fingers fumbling with the buttons of his woolen overcoat. “It’s cold.”

I showed him my backpack. “What you were saying before about wanting to do something – I understand. I want to do something too. Nothing big. Just – something.” I faltered, and then I wasn’t sure what to say next. There was so much anger inside me, so much bitterness. Wave after wave of it. I had to get it out of me, and this was all I could think to do. It wasn’t the same as shooting an arrow into a force field and it definitely wasn’t the same as shooting President Coin through the heart. But it was something.

And it wouldn’t get either of us in much trouble.

For once.

Peeta was watching me steadily, his shoulders hunched against the rising wind, his cheeks and ears already pink with cold. There was still a faint dusting of flour on his forehead and the tip of his nose.

I unzipped my backpack and turned it over, shaking out the walnuts. They were still in their green hulls, so they bounced against the concrete. When the backpack was empty I tossed it aside and toed the walnuts more or less into a pile.

“Have you ever harvested walnuts?” I asked.

He shook his head, which didn’t surprise me. The Mellarks had been bakers, but they’d never had to harvest their own grain. If they’d wanted walnuts, they could easily have bought them at the market.

“You have to get the hulls off first. It’s messy,” I cautioned.

He snorted, for a second sounding uncomfortably like the broken boy the Capitol had returned to me all those months ago, and my stomach lurched. But when I met his eyes, there was no hatred behind the blue, only wry amusement at the idea that he’d care about getting a little messy after all we’d been through.

“Okay,” I said, feeling better if not exactly comforted. “So, there are different ways of hulling walnuts. Some people use knives. I used to know someone—” he’s dead now, of course “—who used to just roll over them again and again with his wagon. This works too.” And with that, I raised one foot, and then brought it down hard on the pile.

A few walnuts skittered away from my foot. The hulls of the ones I’d stomped on didn’t split right away, but I was far from done. With a grunt, I brought my foot down again, so hard that I jarred my hip. I didn’t care. Using all my weight, I turned my ankle this way and that, grinding the walnuts between the concrete and the sole of my boot.

Peeta made a curious sound – not quite a snort, but close. I felt kind of self-conscious suddenly, which must have been how he’d felt when I watched him knead dough. I wasn’t about to stop, though. This felt weirdly satisfying, mangling something to turn it into something I could eat, something useful. Worthwhile destruction.

“Come on,” I said through my gritted teeth. 

Tentatively, he joined me. He didn’t say a word, but I could tell from the jerky, hesitant way he moved that he thought this was strange. 

But no stranger than anything else we’d already had to do to survive. Though he didn’t say it, the thought must have occurred to him because at one point I thought I heard him laugh – a harsh sound, like flint on steel, but better than silence – and when I started jumping up and down on the pile, he did too.

It didn’t take us long to crack most of the hulls, splattering the walkway and our boots with green pulp and black walnut juice. Still, by the time we were done, my lungs were on fire and my ears and fingertips were numb.

And it was snowing.

I’d been so engrossed in my stomping that I hadn’t noticed the first flakes. Immediately, I thought of Prim and my heart seized up, but then Peeta tipped his head back and said “Katniss, look” in a voice that was breathy with wonder.

“We need to bring them inside,” I muttered quickly, dropping to my knees on the walkway and starting to scoop walnuts, mashed hulls and all, into my backpack. They would stain, but I didn’t care. “They need to dry for a few days.”

I felt Peeta’s warm breath against my forehead as he joined me.

“After they dry,” I went on, my eyes lowered, my fingers avoiding his as we snatched up walnuts, “we get to break them. With a hammer.”

He laughed again, and this time it reminded me not so much of flint and steel but the spark they make together. “Katniss,” he said, “we don’t have to wait that long if you still want to break things. There’s the dough. After it rises, we have to punch it down before we can bake it.”

I looked up. The smile he gave me was crooked and a part of me wanted to reach for it, to use my stained fingertips to prod it back into the shape I remembered. I didn’t move. Neither of us did as the snow came down and covered up the mess we’d made on the pavement. 

But I wanted to, and that was – something.

2/28/2012


End file.
